Typography Testing

Tue, 13 Dec 2005

Typography Testing

I happen to be one of those people that prefers to have more space between
sentences than between words. Ideally, this should be about a space and a
half; that's what most typography does and I think it looks good. When
typing in ASCII, I put two spaces between sentences, because that's the
closest approximation that looks good. Unfortunately, HTML collapses
whitespace so you get things like:

Not too bad. There's some extra spacing in there. The
"elit. Fusce" sequence actually has an en space followed by a normal
space, because I have a newline in my source at that point, and HTML
doesn't consider the en space to be whitespace. This seems to work best
with Firefox 1.0 on Linux. In Firefox 1.5 on Windows, for some reason,
the paragraph with the en spaces has extra vertical space between lines.
And Internet Explorer 5 for Windows doesn't display the en spaces; it puts
empty squares in their place.

I also wouldn't mind using nice-looking quote marks for things. HTML has
a tag for inline quoting: the <q> tag. Most browsers don't quite
work properly with it. Here's a nice bit of quoted text:

“And then he said, ‘Stop, or, as my father used to say, “cut
it out!”’”

When rendered with <q> tags, it looks like this:

And then he said, Stop, or, as my father used to say,
cut it out!

Nobody gets it exactly right. Firefox 1.0 uses ASCII double quotes for
everything. Firefox 1.5 correctly uses double curly and then single curly
quotes, but it also uses single curly quotes on the innermost quote. w3m
uses the ASCII backtick for all leading quotes and the ASCII single quote
for all trailing quotes. Internet Explorer 5 doesn't render anything.